


Wasn't There Supposed To Be Something About Eyes?

by kythyria



Category: The Matrix (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 15:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19976062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kythyria/pseuds/kythyria
Summary: A human gets taken out of the Matrix in an unusual manner.





	Wasn't There Supposed To Be Something About Eyes?

Dateline: some time after the Matrix films, kind of.

Nobody’s sure why this didn’t happen sooner, and indeed why it happened at all. Well, the humans aren’t. The Machines speculate it’s because there’s some sort of directive they haven’t been able to notice, let alone excise, somehow persisting through generations of drastic evolution. Or maybe all sapient life, mechanical or fleshy, just tends to do these sorts of things. But others have covered the question of humanity’s continued existence, and of why reconfigure the Matrix in the way it was when the cycle was broken, and the details of the repercussions it wrought, far better than I can, so on with the memoirs.

The process of first realising you could leave the Matrix is an odd one. You just... notice something one day. Just a little out of place in a way you can’t quite define. And you follow it. The famous one is a white rabbit, but it could be anything. For me, it was doors whose lock has a keyhole-shaped keyhole, the ones with a flared bottom. Who even _uses_ ward locks these days? Eventually, I found a key in my apartment that wasn’t there before, and it opened them. One thing led to another, and after a long sequence of events I found myself in the situation that is the subject of this text.

There’s always conditions involved on being plugged back in, or on being unplugged. The unplugged humans want you to fit well into their city. If it’s a Machine unplugging you, you’re either dead or they want you for something that—somehow—can’t be done by them. Same goes for being plugged back in: you’ll have to forget the whole affair after doing something for the Machines. In my case, the condition boiled down to “test subject”, specifically a test subject for doing things to humans that Machines have been able to do to themselves for a long time (the human brain is not the most well-designed of thinking engines). So I found myself following the keyholes—it’s apparently easier to just tap into that than put up a sign—through a confusing tangle of corridors, getting hopelessly lost, until I ended up in a room that I suppose must have been the experimental apparatus.

Fitting the famous theme that the mechanism for getting Machine intelligence out of the Matrix manifests as a subway train, this was a miniature subway station, with a simple maintenance train sitting on the tracks. It was easy to operate, with a pair of buttons labelled “STOP” and “GO”. I pushed the obvious one, and off I went down a seemingly infinite tunnel.

The actual sensation of being unplugged I can’t ever recommend. It’s at best unpleasant, and if there’s a reflective surface handy you’ll be able to see yourself get covered in mirror goo—like if mercury decided to be jelly-like—which at once stings and freezes, and then the automatic systems kick in, and kick you out of the Matrix. Recall that when jacked in, your physical body is basically disconnected from your brain, and certainly from your mind and point of view. I’m told the usual result of being unplugged is that you get reconnected to your body, which although a differnet kind of unpleasant, at least connects you to something.

This train didn’t do that.

Instead, _everything_ vanished. I couldn’t even hear my heartbeat, as I’d heard you could in sensory deprivation tanks. No sound, no light, feeling nothing, not even my own body. A timeless instant of unknowable duration in which I wondered if this was really some sneaky way to save on having to run the Matrix, or if something had failed entirely.

Apparently it hadn’t, for a loose awareness of time crept in. Time flies when you’re having fun, and stands still when you’re isolated like this, and it said I’d only been here a few seconds before vision returned. Odd vision, I still couldn’t see my body no matter where I looked, nor could I feel it. I was just a point of view, in a space where the distant backdrop, in every direction, was an orange pattern that reminded me of autumn leaves. As I looked at it, it _became_ autumn leaves, like I was inside a vast ball of them.

“Interesting backdrop. More high... frequencies than I wouldhavechosen, but it’s... certainly evocative of something. I can... becalled Conductor.” said a voice, and I somehow rotated, despite my lack of a body, to see what I can only describe as a badly tuned scientist. Human in a lab coat, but somehow indistinct, and tiny fragments of them were floating a bit to the side of where they should be.

I tried to reply, 〖is this part of the experiment or just trying to do the... a form you are comfortable with... thing〗. Apparently I didn’t have a voice, to go with not having the rest of my body, but the words definitely happened. I just couldn’t hear them as sound. The Conductor clearly detected them, though, and replied.

“Both. Theexperiment isgoing smoo~thly, but it doesn’tlook quite so... muchlike we’re both comfortable.”

〖?I suppose the idea was that I would have a form you were comfortable with as well as vice versa〗, I asked, still not quite managing to get whatever the equivalent of intonation was right.

“Precisely. Neither of... us is comfortable, so on with... the program.”

I could hear the lack of capitals in “program”. Sound, even simulated sound, must not have been the only thing conveying meaning here. I barely had time to ponder that, before everything vanished again. Abruptly, but the affair with the mirror coating and so forth could hardly happen when there was nothing for it to coat. Perhaps that was another feature of wherever it was I’d just been, no point hanging around once you’re dispatching test subjects to the tests.

The next thing I knew—not counting the senseless void as a thing—I was opening one eye. I wasn’t sure whether what I saw was monochromatically lit or if the eye in question was only capable of seeing in greyscale. There was no human in evidence anywhere I could see, just oddly organic-looking machinery, or perhaps Machinery. A thing like a metal bush with cameras for flowers regarded me for several seconds, then moved away on rails set into the metal floor. The metal floor coordinated nicely with, or at least continued the theme of, the distant metal walls, metal ceiling, and metal everything else. Not much of it made sense at first glance, although doing so with one eye probably didn’t help, so I tried opening my other eye. There wasn’t much improvement, so I proceeded to open _another_ eye.

This went on for some time.

By the time I stopped I’d opened something like ten eyes, although none of them was looking back at myself, so I wasn’t sure what I’d been downloaded into yet, other than that it wasn’t at all a standard issue human body. I’d have to look like a hammerhead shark to fit this many eyes, for one thing. Maybe all humans are like that and the Matrix just doesn’t bother simulating it—now that I thought about it, the eyes furthest to each end had pretty good telephoto lenses. Built-in binoculars wouldn’t make it easy to cheap out on distant details.

No. This didn’t feel like anything I’d heard of regarding getting unplugged. No wonder the Program I’d met earlier had a lab coat, this must be something new and experimental. Speaking of experimentation, I tried to wiggle my toes. Nothing, but had I not been half-suspended from some unseen frame I would have fallen over as legs I couldn’t twist to see jerked. With the apparent sensitivity in mind I very gingerly wiggled some more, including toes I didn’t think I had.

By the feel of it, I had a lot more than two legs, but only three toes on each one. I still couldn’t see them, but new sensations were creeping in, so I could at least feel where they were, as well as some more things I’m pretty sure humans don’t have, like strain gauges on the brackets being used to hold me up, and... something... long and flexible attached to the back of me. 

Huh. That might be where my hands went, if whoever designed this body really liked squid and octopuses and the like. As I discovered, though, these weren’t simple arms, they were going all in with the squid theme and really quite flexible, almost tentacular really. As I whipped them about, I realised something in them was getting driven, beyond a simple position sense. Somewhere between someone moving your arm to point out how lazy you’re being, and having an inner ear in your palm. How I didn’t get dizzy I had no idea.

Whipping sounds a bit too coordinated, actually, _flailing_ might be more like it. Flailing hard enough moved my “torso” enough to feel the same kind of whatever-it-was getting nudged by the motion.

〖Still not the hang of it yet?〗, asked a non-voice. It sounded like, or rather, had the same non-sound quality as, my attempts at talking before I got sent to wherever and whatever I currently was. Nonetheless, something about it made quite clear that the Conductor was speaking or transmitting or whatever it was. 〖Not really, this is all pretty weird. Didn’t you have any androids in stock then?〗, I replied, not realising until afterwards that I’d done that without even thinking about it.

〖That wouldn’t have told me very much. It seems I must still work on making it so you’d instantly know how to use this body rather than flail around awkwardly. It works for kung fu, why not tentacles?〗, said/transmitted/sent/etc the Conductor, just as I managed to get the end of a tentacle in front of me and a good look at the end of it with the eyes that were good at close-ups. No suckers, but a three-way radial sort of gripper, like a very elaborate, heavy duty, version of the claw machine in an arcade, or perhaps of a bird’s foot. And all the tentacles were like that, so what I lacked in dexterity I apparently made up for with sheer number of things I could juggle at once.

〖Maybe make it work for whatever I’m supposed to use to get around? Unless that’s the tentacles.〗, I, uh, said. The Conductor didn’t reply except to use the contraption holding me up to lift and then abruptly _drop_ me!

Oh.

That’s how it works.

That sense I thought was an inner-ear analog, was actually some kind of honest-to-goodness _anti-gravity drive_! It just so happened to double as that when “limp”. Like an electric motor being used as a generator. Knowing this didn’t actually help much though, since I couldn’t keep myself straight, eventually settling facing straight up to the ceiling. It was much easier doing that than to figure out how to make each tentacle hover the right amount to keep me level. 

At least when I was preoccupied with what had just happened. Last week, I’d been living a perfectly normal, if simulated, life as a perfectly normal human. Now, I’d been yanked out of that, apparently out of my real body entirely, and stuffed into some sort of flying tentacle robot at the whim of a Machine of unclear motives beyond, possibly, seeing what happens when you stuff a human mind into a mechanical squid.

Well, now it had the answer: You get a delayed freakout. If I still had lungs, I’m pretty sure I’d be hyperventilating, but I didn’t, so I had to settle for thinking freaked out thoughts. Why build squidbots? Why jam anyone into them? What was the purpose of this experiment? What would happen to me?

Existential panic is a pretty good distraction, so I didn’t notice the small vehicle with unquestionably blue glowing rings land near me, nor the beetle-like robot that floated down to meet it, and certainly not the human stepping out. Admittedly, by that point I was distracted from the line of thinking as to just how much of me had made it into this thing by the metallic noise of a whole bunch of metal tentacles scraping against a metal deck as I drifted into it. Evidently I hadn’t got any sort of balance reflex that would keep me hovering in place like a human can stand without thinking.

“...worked correctly?”

“...thought”—*scrape*—“doubts...”

I was jolted out of my musings by coming to a halt in a pile of my own tentacles, thus adding embarrassment to my list of woes.

“Don't worry. Everyone’s hopeless their first time in reality.”


End file.
